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Authors: Ben Elton

BOOK: Chart Throb
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Beryl left her seat and joined Stanley and his children, grabbing him round the neck and kissing him.
‘As a mum,’ she shouted, ‘as a woman and as an old rock chick from way back, I know the real thing when I see it, and Stanley . . . you are it. You are the man. You are manly, Stanley, and don’t let anyone ever tell you different because you are so talented and sexy it isn’t funny.’
Then Beryl, as ever unable to suppress her deeply vulgar side and considering herself so suffused with the common touch as to be invulnerable to bad taste, turned to the camera and positively shouted.
‘Hey, are you watching out there, Stanley’s ex? Whoever the hell you are! How does it feel to know that you have lost this hero? This giant of a man? You blew it, babes, and you know it because
every
woman wants him now, babes! I know I do. I know I’d like to give him one! Never mind “a very good year”, how about a very good shag!’
‘Thank you, Beryl!’ Calvin called quickly, pressing his private panic button which alerted the vision mixer to cut away from whoever was on screen immediately. Despite the fact that this device had occasionally been used in other circumstances, it was generally known as the Beryl Button.
‘Yes. Thank you very much for that, Beryl,’ Calvin continued. ‘We are a
family
programme, remember.’
‘I say what I feel, Calvin,’ said Beryl. ‘It’s how I was reared. It’s what I teach my kids. It’s the only way I know.’
Eventually Beryl was persuaded to return to her seat and Stanley was unanimously voted the hit of the show and a real contender to win.
In week four he was instructed to sing ‘Firestarter’ by the Prodigy. He was dressed in pantomime retro-punk style and surrounded by gurning, half-naked female dancers who were choreographed to rub their crotches on him at every opportunity, thus dramatically puncturing the image of quiet maturity and fatherly sophistication that had been building over the previous weeks.
‘I had been meaning to give him a longer run,’ Calvin explained to his team at the weekly production meeting, ‘but we’ll never top last week, so it’s a perfect moment to dump him. The website will go crazy. We need a bit of extra controversy to keep the heat off HRH. Besides, I can’t risk Beryl going mad like that again. Asking a man to shag her in front of his five-year-old child, ridiculous.’
‘Particularly since we all know they haven’t finished building her fanny yet,’ Chelsie added.
Besides the entirely unsuitable song and the tastelessly oversexualized production, Stanley was to be further handicapped in week four by his pre-performance video package in which he was persuaded to evoke the image of his children so often that it went beyond the point of being bearable even to an audience generally anaesthetized to any amount of cloying sentiment.
‘I’m doing this for my kids . . . for my little girl . . . and for my little boy . . . My little boy and girl are everything to me . . . that’s why I’m doing it . . . for them, my little boy and girl . . . That’s all that matters to me . . . I don’t care about myself . . . It’s all about my little girl and my little boy.’
After this Stanley performed his song, at the conclusion of which Beryl, misjudging the mood of the studio, insisted on leaving the judges’ panel and giving Stanley a huge tear-drenched hug.
‘That comes from a mum to a dad,’ she said. ‘You owned that song, Stanley. I could see that you were singing “Firestarter” for your kids.’
Beryl made this gesture of her own volition. Calvin had not even briefed her on his intention of manoeuvring against Stanley that week. He was confident that the moment parenthood was mentioned, Beryl, unable to resist drawing the focus to her own celebrated mother status, would ignore all other factors and once more wallow in a mawkish swamp of crocodile tears and false sentiment. She did not let him down.
Stanley’s performance of ‘Firestarter’, coupled with Beryl’s efforts at parental solidarity, ensured that he received one of the two lowest votes of the week, so he could then be safely ejected from the competition.
‘I love you, Stanley, big time, you
know
that,’ said Beryl. ‘You rock so much it isn’t funny. And as a mum I recognize a dad . . . but I’m sorry, it’s time to go home.’
Week Five
In week five Suki, the surgically enhanced sex worker, was sent home. Calvin knew that she would go at some point and had been happy to wait until the moment arose organically.
‘It won’t be long,’ he predicted, ‘before some pimp or trick comes out of the woodwork and the Sundays do her over.’ It had taken a little longer than Calvin had expected because the Suki who emerged each week from the hair and make-up department to sing country songs about long-suffering women did not look a bit like the Suki who had recently been working the kerbs of Birmingham’s pick-up areas. It was not in fact until she herself began to hint at her past in her increasingly confessional pre-performance videos that the pennies began to drop. When they did they tumbled like an avalanche, with any number of unpleasant figures coming forward to sell their tales of marathon sex romps with the briefly famous Suki.
While many were sympathetic to Suki’s recent employment as a prostitute,
Chart Throb
was a pre-watershed family show and the general mood on the websites and of those who wrote to the newspapers began to turn against a woman who had presented herself as an ‘ex-glamour girl’ and who now turned out to be a not very ex purveyor of kerbside blow jobs. Calvin ensured Suki’s fate with his instructions to Costume, Hair and Make-up.
‘I want the true Suki to shine through. We are, after all, a people show, a
real
people show. Suki is a real woman. A woman with a
lived-in
feel . . .’
‘Well, she’s certainly been rented and occupied a few times,’ the various departments muttered as they went about undoing the excellent cover-up job they had achieved in previous weeks. They did not like doing it, it went against every instinct they had, but when Suki appeared on stage for week five suddenly looking her age and in a dress sufficiently revealing to expose the tragic inadequacies of the cheap cosmetic surgery she had undergone, Calvin got his wish.
The song she had been given was ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’, which quite apart from being beyond her musically was either a lie or else represented self-delusion that had crossed the line into mental instability. From her irregularly Botoxed lips and sagging, asymmetrical breast implants to her knobbly, bony, tottering legs, inelegantly revealed in an inappropriate microskirt designed for teenagers, from her sprayed-on tan, bolted-on cheekbone enhancements and overbleached hair to the string of street pimps queuing up to make a few days’ drug money discussing her modus operandi (
The Bus Stop Was Her Brothel
), Suki clearly had a great deal to regret, considerably more than Edith Piaf ever had.
Of course Calvin could have turned all this to Suki’s favour.
‘Television truth is presentation and editing,’ he said in Hospitality after Suki had been voted off the programme. ‘I did think about playing her as a strong, streetsmart lady who had used her body and male sexuality to empower herself.’
In the end, however, Calvin had other fish to fry.
Searching for Shaiana
Emma could sit still no longer. She decided that she had to find Shaiana. Her friends Tom and Mel assured her that she was obsessing unnecessarily and Calvin too, when they had a moment together, was entirely unmoved by her fears.
‘I’ve told you, darling,’ he said, ‘nutters are our business, you must
never
let them get to you.’
Emma herself recognized that her paranoia was basically self-constructed and also self-perpetuating, in that the more she worried, the more worried she became, but that did not make her feelings any less real. She was scared of Shaiana, she simply couldn’t help it.
‘I thought
she
was the victim,’ Emma told Calvin, ‘but it turns out I am. I can’t get her out of my mind. I have to put a stop to this.’
‘All right then,’ Calvin said. ‘Go and spy on her if you must. She’ll be working in a shop somewhere. They all are.’
Shaiana had claimed that she had nowhere to go. Emma decided to find out exactly what she had meant by that and was disturbed to discover that in fact Shaiana appeared to have gone nowhere. Having run weeping from Pop School, she seemed to have disappeared.
Emma went to the offices of CALonic TV and asked a mate to look out Shaiana’s original entry form. Within a few minutes Emma found herself once more staring at the bold, childish hand that had initially caught her eye during the envelope-opening stage of the competition.
I want it so much. I want it so much . . . I am me.
Shaiana had, as required, supplied an address and a mobile telephone number. First Emma tried the number. She had no idea what she would say if Shaiana answered but in fact the number turned out to be unobtainable. There was no landline number given, but that was not in itself suspicious as some of Emma’s friends had begun to rely solely on their mobiles to keep in touch.
Emma decided that she must visit the address Shaiana had given, which was in South Kensington. Once more Emma did not know what she intended to do when she met Shaiana but had decided she would worry about that if and when she did meet her.
The address turned out to be that of a small and rather expensive private hotel. They remembered Shaiana, who had stayed for a week some months previously, but they had not seen her since.
‘Except on
Chart Throb
,’ said the lady behind the desk. ‘We were so surprised when she turned up on that. Shouldn’t have been really because she did nothing but sing in her room, had to stop her doing it at night. I thought she was rather good actually. Don’t think Calvin should have chucked her off.’
Week Six
They were halfway through the contest by this time so Calvin had had ample opportunity to study the public’s weekly voting patterns in detail and hence knew exactly the levels of popularity that each contestant was enjoying. This was an element of the
Chart Throb
grand strategy that even Chelsie, with her instinctive understanding of the dark arts of reality television, had been only vaguely conscious of.
‘The secret truth of all these voting shows,’ Calvin explained gleefully to her while Trent went out to Starbucks to get the coffees, ‘is
not even a secret.
Like absolutely every other aspect of our manipulation process, it’s glaringly obvious to anyone who wishes to see it but—’
‘Nobody does wish to see it,’ Chelsie interrupted, quoting one of her boss’s favourite maxims.
‘Exactly.’
‘Because it would spoil the fun.’
‘Correcto-mundo, lady. But if they
did
want to spoil the fun they might easily reflect that the producers of every single voting show from
Big Brother
to
Shagging on Thin Ice with the Stars
get to see and to analyse every single vote that is cast every single week throughout the entire series . . .’
‘And so can manipulate their coverage accordingly?’
‘Of course!’ Calvin was almost hugging himself with the fun of it. ‘Imagine if the political parties in a general election were able to see inside the minds of each individual voter at seven-day intervals throughout a three-month campaign! It’s what they dream of! It’s what market research and opinion polls desperately try to emulate but of course never can. A genuine window into the mind of the voter. If Labour or the Tories could truly gauge the popular reaction to every single policy launch, every speech and every personality throughout their campaigns, they could cut their cloth accordingly, bigging up the ideas that played well, burying the people who alienated the public.’
‘Of course! And we have that information.’ Chelsie was as excited as Calvin.
Calvin always kept the data that he was given a closely guarded secret, so nobody on the team was ever in the loop as to how much power that knowledge gave him. Now Calvin was revealing his trump card.
‘I always love it when Keely reads out the voting results each week and says “in no particular order”. Because I’m sitting there thinking
I know the order
. The nation thinks it’s anybody’s race, that anybody could win, but from
day one
I know who’s a hero and who’s a zero.’
‘And then you change it?’
‘Exactly. Whereas a politician would use the information to massage his popular policies, I tend to use it to
redistribute
popularity. If somebody is getting too big early on I’ll edit against them to calm things down because the last thing we want is a runaway winner. Where’s the jeopardy in that?’
‘Nowhere! Thanks, Trent.’
Trent had just returned with the cardboard tray of coffees.
‘Yeah, thanks, Trent,’ Calvin said absent-mindedly.
‘No worries, boss. Yo,’ Trent replied. ‘I got muffins.’
Calvin, carried away with his own cleverness, ignored the proffered bag.
‘And without jeopardy, Chelsie, there is no show.’
There followed the usual Starbucks hiatus while everybody discovered that they had the wrong cups and that having ordered a skinny caramel latte they were drinking a chocolate fudge frappé.

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